There's a weird modern military turn based strategy game where you fight invading orcs. It's called Spellcross and until recently it only was available through Hall of the Underdogs. Great game, very Xcom, balls hard.

Royalties is part of the music business. In TV, everyone gets paid per episode.

Most artists never make any money at all...

He who pays the piper calls the tune. Don't complain that modern media is garbage that doesn't cater to you while also saying middle class soccer moms can sponsor everything.

Hey, if you can't be consistent at least be honest.

It's more complex than that - You aren't wrong, but there's a lot more going on. Almost anything made by an employee as part of their job belongs to the company. If Amazon licences your work to make something based on it, that's one thing, but if you are a jobbing writer who gets assigned to develop a new series, Amazon will own everything. You get paid in your salary, not in royalties. And, frankly, a lot of creatives are quite happy with that arrangement (since it's so rare to make money at all).

And that's why it's... Odd. Because the "creator" is some dude who has already been paid; literally has received his salary. But the performance of his show does impact him, at least to some degree. Low ratings don't mean he gets paid less, but it means he's unlikely to earn more in future.

Indeed. And that's without considering that a lot of SaaS stuff on the consumer level lets you cancel at any time. Ok, you can get burned for 30 bucks if it turns out not to be all that useful, but the full packages are typically priced somewhere between eyewatering and "ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING?", and they always have been.

A perfect example here - GeForce Now costs like 20 per month, cancel whenever you like. A 4080 gpu costs way over a grand. It's up to you whether you prefer to own, rent or not bother at all, but it doesn't take a lot to convince me to spend 20 bucks, but it does take a lot to get me to stump up for a whole new PC.

There's nuance in the pirate ranks my dude. Some people don't really believe in property rights at all, some people think that piracy is acceptable when you can't afford/obtain the original, some just like to try before they buy.

It does matter though - The price paid to the creator was based on the prospect of X number of sales or Y numbers of adverts. Almost everyone who presently is trying to get their creative works seen is hoping that being seen helps them to "make it" and be able to write or sing or whatever as a full time job.

It's true that SaaS does stop you from owning software... But what good does "owning" a piece of software do you if you can't get updates anyway? Back in the pre-internet era we got used to software existing as discrete versions but it hasn't been like that for a LONG time. As soon as patching became a regular occurrence, "ownership" became a service contract with a CD attached. Then the CD vanished, and it just became a service.

While I do dislike needless "as a service" stuff, that model does genuinely suit a lot of people. It's not a conjob; companies offer this stuff because a lot of customers want it. Most of the companies that are selling you SaaS stuff themselves use SaaS things in-house.

There is cultural value in entertainment. And as modern people we have a need for meaningful forms of entertainment that help us process and make sense of the world. But it's still not "knowledge". Knowledge needs to be free because there is no set way to use it; but Curb Your Enthusiasm is just a thing to watch for entertainment. If you are a legit Curb scholar then you have a copyright exemption, even.

You can object to the ludicrous avarice of studios and networks while still saying that creative work is real work, and that even if we personally can't afford or don't want to pay for it, that society as a whole should reward creativity.

Knowledge does want to be free, but its a stretch to say Guardians 3 is a unit of "knowledge". Creative works kinda don't want to be free; Guardians is only desirable because of the cast and crew's work, and you acting out the script is not the same at all. We shouldn't devalue creative labour, even as pirates.

Piracy cuts into the profits of studio investors, and that's good, without impacting how much actors and crew are paid. Win/win.